Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  His next work was for a bakery, soliciting new accounts, followed by a brief stay with a baby-food company doing the same. Neither gave him either security or dignity, but each had the decided asset of being outside. “You can’t expect a man who has spent almost one-third of his life at sea to like being cooped up in a factory with no windows,” he told Carol.

  Eighteen months into their marriage, Carol became pregnant. She continued work for five months, then retired from Wall Street with no misgivings, no feeling that a career was being interrupted or ended because of motherhood. Work had been an interesting, necessary thing to do, a step to take, and now it was over. She would move willingly into the traditional role of woman. George, while he professed happiness over the news, felt panic that he could not put down.

  I never really expected to get married, he told himself. I never thought I would have the courage to take the step, or find a good woman who would have me. I’m immature. I’m scared. I don’t have enough money. I may never have enough money. I can’t accept this new responsibility.

  But he never told Carol these things. As it would always be with George, he kept his most private thoughts bottled up. On the surface he remained his extraordinarily cheerful self, rising each day and calling out happily, “Good morning! How are you this beautiful day!” Carol would frown and wave a limp hand in greeting. “I can’t even speak until I get coffee,” she would say, continually startled that her husband could be so ebullient at dawn.

  Carol would discover that no matter what turmoil churned inside her husband, he would generally opt for harmony and peace. Driving home from a party at which one of the guests had been a little drunk and had found fault with everything George said, Carol wondered why her husband had not gotten angry with the man. “Why don’t you get mad at people like that?” she said. “Perhaps I should have,” answered George. “But the other guy was loaded and it was booze talking. I think it’s easier to laugh things off and save getting mad for a really important reason.”

  The obstetrician expressed immediate concern over Carol’s pregnancy. The strain of delivery, he warned her, could throw a damaging burden on her heart. This worry was compounded by the fact that Carol’s blood was Rh-negative, and George’s Rh-positive. A cardiologist was notified to attend the birth. The baby’s delivery was predicted for June 6,1954. On June 5, while the young couple dined at their favorite Italian restaurant, the one where they had courted, the pains began. George rushed Carol to the hospital in a taxi and, after several hours, the doctor appeared and told the expectant father to go home, because it would be a long time before the baby would come.

  “Is she all right?” George asked.

  The doctor nodded his head guardedly. “We’re watching her heart,” he said.

  The next morning George returned to the hospital at dawn. The news was alarming. No longer could a heartbeat be heard within Carol’s womb. There was fear the child was dying or already dead. During an X ray to see where the infant was positioned, George lurked outside in the hallway. When Carol was wheeled from the chamber, she saw her husband’s anguished face, which he quickly tried to mask with a reassuring smile. But Carol went to the delivery room crying, believing her child to be lost.

  With heart specialists gathered about the table, the obstetrician used forceps to pull the baby from the womb. When it emerged, they discovered that the umbilical cord was wrapped around its neck and that in a few days the child would have strangled.

  The long and perilous labor tore strength from Carol. She had feared throughout the pregnancy that her baby would be born deformed, that she would pass on her damaged heart, or worse. When the doctor told her that the infant was normal in every way, she nodded weakly, not really believing him. She was encouraged when a nurse confirmed the infant’s wholeness. But not until her husband appeared at her bedside with a bouquet of spring flowers and a face of joy and wonder did she believe.

  George bent over and kissed Carol tenderly. “We have a beautiful redheaded baby boy,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Is he all right? I mean, is everything there?” Carol asked urgently.

  George shook his head enthusiastically. He held up ten fingers to indicate that all equipment was normal. “He’s perfect.”

  Later, when George was allowed to hold the baby, he rocked the tiny life in his hands. “Well, Momma,” he said, “what are we going to call young Mr. Diener?”

  Carol suggested Richard, after her father. Because Ring had no sons of his own, he would be flattered to have his grandson as namesake. George tactfully pointed out that his parents would be offended if that name were given. A compromise was reached. The baby would be called George Richard, after both grandfathers.

  “But we’ll call him Richard,” said Carol.

  George nodded. He pulled back the blanket to examine once more his child’s face. He experienced that moment every first father has, the realization that nothing he had ever done or would ever do could best his production of a new life, the extension of his line, the plant of his own seed.

  “Welcome to the world, Richard,” he said, “Richie, my son.”

  PART TWO

  Richie

  Chapter Four

  With fatherhood, George had a new job, work that brought him home to the tiny apartment exhausted each night. He had learned from a co-worker at the baby-food company of an opening in a similar line of work. Applying to a British food company that was expanding its American sales force, George was hired as a “merchandiser,” which meant that he was on the road every day, the trunk of his car loaded with thousands of spice bottles. It was his responsibility to visit 250 stores each week in a large territory that stretched from Brooklyn all the way out on Long Island to the southern tier of burgeoning Nassau County. The pay was small, but if he worked hard enough persuading store owners to stock, and restock, his brands of everything from arrowroot to tarragon, he could expect, with commission, around $75 a week—adequate wages in 1954.

  Though he did not reveal it to Carol for many years, George at twenty-six felt pressure from many sides, pressure so severe that on more than one day he felt like finding a different highway and pointing his spice-laden car down it and running away. On one level, he liked his work because of the freedom, the freedom of not being confined in one place for more than a few minutes at a time, the freedom of being able to stop and revel in the beauty of a grove of cedar before the subdividers’ bulldozers sliced them from the landscape. He would never lose his awe of nature. George was a conservationist a full decade before the idea became a national concern.

  But he found it exceedingly difficult to push himself and his products in front of hostile store managers. When one of them would say that he had no desire to stock George’s particular brand of tea, the novice salesman’s initial reaction was to flee, to escape rejection. The insecurities of his teen-age years were still very much a part of the husband, father, and new salesman. He could bluff Carol into believing that he was genial and in control of his life. But at heart he was a quiet, frightened man in both business and social affairs. As a child he had used his fists and his daring to attend his anxieties and reinforce his identity, but they seemed useless as a man. The stability that Carol and their friends assumed was George’s strength in truth was in those years a mask ever ready to fall off.

  Often he would return to the apartment at night and find Carol crying, distraught over her new role. Richie himself was healthy, cheerful, and inquisitive, but his mother was encountering familiar problems. One night she threw herself into George’s arms and wept, “I just can’t take it any longer!” There had been a disagreement that day with George’s mother, who had proclaimed that baby powder was bad for babies. “I used cornstarch,” said the mother-in-law, “and believe me, it’s better.”

  George put on one of his smiles. “Well,” he said, “what do you want me to do?”

  “Ask her to leave me alone,” answered Carol.

  George looked around the room. T
he walls closed in on him, as walls always did. It occurred to him that Carol was trapped as well. It was not like his wife to rage over such a trivial matter. She was at most times a gentle, soft-spoken woman. In the back of George’s head was the dream of someday buying a house in the country, a place with trees and room for a family to grow. “When we can afford it,” Carol had always answered. Even though there was no more money now, less even, than the day they married, George decided this night that they must begin their search for an escape.

  One practical reason, he pointed out, was that if they could live on Long Island, he would be closer to his sales route and thus able to spend more time at home. It did not seem necessary to explain another. How could a man who had seen the cliffs of Dover expect to raise a family in the prison of a New York City apartment?

  Carol was not enthusiastic. “He says he wants a better life for me and Richie,” she told her sister, June, who by now had married a mortician and was living on Long Island, thirty miles from New York, in a village called East Meadow. “He so loves nature, trees, to be out in the woods. But I don’t care for these things! I’d rather be close to my parents. George has less strong ties with his, he went away to sea so early.”

  Every Sunday George and Carol, with Richie crawling in exploration about the back seat, searched the expanses of Long Island, looking for a house they both liked and could afford. “Our maximum price,” Carol kept saying, as she continued to keep the family books, “is $10,000. And our monthly payments with everything included can’t be much more than $75.”

  On several afternoons, looking in the vicinity of West Islip, a good two hours from the city, they put down a ten- or fifteen-dollar deposit on a house. But on the long drive back to New York, in the torturous traffic that choked Long Island, traffic that would grow in annoyance with each passing year, first Carol, then George would find an excuse, an “out” to avoid the commitment. Finally one Sunday morning, looking in the storybook village of East Meadow where June lived, they encountered a little white and green cottage with three bedrooms, a handsome brick and shingle exterior, a patio outside the master bedroom, and a fenced yard with trees. The problem was the price, $12,500—too much, Carol said sadly. George nodded unhappily. He would usually defer to Carol in matters financial, and he rarely took any major step before winning his wife’s approval. But standing in the backyard of the green and white cottage, feeling the quiet of the neighborhood about him, picturing his son running free in a nearby field with the youngsters whose faraway cries he could faintly hear, sensing his identity firming with ownership of a house and the earth on which it stood, George decided to take rare issue with Carol. Not only was the house accommodating to all their specifics, he said, the village was what he wanted. Its inhabitants were mainly young, working-class, the men veterans of the war. The taxes were lower than in other communities they had explored, because nearby Mitchel Air Force Base paid so much that home owners were less burdened. The ocean was near, a quarter of an hour away, close enough to catch a summer breeze, and there seemed to be a boat in every other driveway, strong lure for a man who had spent seven years at sea. Even the name was seductive. East Meadow! Certainly it sounded more fitting than nearby Levittown or Hempstead. George already knew that Algonquin Indians had lived there first, in their low and circular houses that looked like outdoor ovens. Pioneers from Connecticut had settled the lush green plains in 1643; later the Redcoats had occupied it during the Revolutionary War. Not until after World War II had it been much more than fertile farm land, a vegetable basket for the great cities of the Northeast. From 5,000 residents in 1941 to 28,000 in 1956, the year in which the Dieners stood in the little backyard, was remarkable growth, George pointed out. Not only would it be a proper home for his family, it would be an investment! Never had Carol heard George speak of anything with such longing. Still, she pointed out, the house was simply more than they could afford.

  But when she put Richie down on the grass, the child tottered away with shrieks of laughter. “Well, he likes it, obviously,” said George.

  “I like it, too,” said Carol, weakening. “I love it.”

  “Then we’re going to buy it,” said George.

  The down payment was $300, which the Dieners realized with a little help from both parents, and the mortgage, on the GI bill, was $82 a month, including taxes and insurance. Thus in late 1956 George and Carol and their two-year-old son, Richie, left New York City and moved to East Meadow, unknowing participants in an extraordinary American drama, the flight to the suburbs that crested during the Eisenhower years. Hundreds of thousands of George Dieners came home from a war, took a wife, sired a child, felt the constriction of life in a crowded city, found the money that, combined with the largesse of a federal government eager to lend money at cheap rates to its voting veterans, was enough for flight. But all too soon they would learn that in escaping the vertical city, they were creating a horizontal one, with problems and agony yet to come.

  Richie grew normally into a chunky little boy whose fiery red hair and happy disposition charmed and drew the attention of everyone who saw him. Riding in his mother’s cart at the supermarket, he would reach out and tug a stranger’s sleeve. “Hi, my name is Richie, what’s yours?” he would say. He attacked life with fervor, be it walking, which he did at nine months without pausing to crawl first, or the tricycle he rode with passion, or the insects he caught and brought to his mother for uneasy inspection. Carol lost count of the number of times her small boy came into the house with arms and face and legs puffed and angry from bee stings. The pain did not deter him; he was trying to learn about them.

  A neighbor was enchanted by Richie’s ritual as he walked down his street each summer morning to a friend’s house. The child had a greeting for every object he passed: “Good morning, Mr. Maple. How are you, Mrs. Rose Bush? Hello there, Mr. Bluejay.” “It’s extraordinary,” the neighbor woman said. “He’s not just a little kid chattering and fooling around. He seems to personally know each plant, bird, and puppy dog on the whole block.”

  Infatuation with nature was clearly the gift of his father, and George welcomed it. On weekends he took his son for long walks in the woods near the Vanderbilt Estate on Long Island, explaining with patience the wonders of birds’ nests and woodpecker holes and how carpenter ants can quickly fell a tree. While other children sat paralyzed in front of television sets, Richie watched with fascination as beavers constructed a dam along an upstate stream, or crouched on a beach examining—while asking endless questions of his father—the beauty and mystery of a seashell.

  Richie’s early report cards in school noted both his interests and a personality problem that surfaced early. In 1960, at the end of his kindergarten year, the teacher wrote, “Richie is an active member of the group. But he needs firm discipline. His interests are blocks, trucks, and ANIMALS!” A year later, the first grade teacher reported, “Richie tries to be cooperative, but he finds it hard. He is active and cannot discipline himself. His interests are two: things scientific, and animals. He continually amazes his classmates and especially his teacher.”

  In a conference with one of Richie’s teachers, Carol learned that her son was tormented by some children in his class who teased him about his hair and his weight. He was still a plump little boy at seven, despite Carol’s feeling that he would slim down as both she and George had done in childhood. Easily inflamed, Richie would hit anyone who teased him—something George could easily understand. The echoes of his own childhood would resound more and more with each passing year. The parents talked casually of their son’s new reputation in school. Carol brought the subject up now and then, but George professed delight that Richie was not letting anyone push him around. It was hard for either parent to grow concerned, because Richie at home was a continual delight—energetic, inquisitive, and obedient. “He never even got very sick with childhood diseases the way other kids do,” said Carol.

  An elementary school teacher had mixed feelings as well on
in the afternoon a little girl with blond pigtails began ragging Richie during art class. She pointed out that Richie was drawing “fat people” on his paper. “Fat people draw fat people best,” she announced to those around her. Richie looked at his tormentor sharply, then coolly reached into his pocket and pulled out a small but violently wriggling snake. Either he had brought the snake to school and kept it all day, or he had found it during recess. Richie quickly deposited his snake on the girl’s shoulder. “I scolded Richie, of course,” said the teacher, “but the little girl was a stinker and she had been asking for it a long time. Besides, Richie kept saying, ‘But I only wanted to show it to her’ so convincingly that I had to bite my tongue to keep from breaking up.”

  Richie’s second grade teacher reported that at eight, “Richie’s mental ability is average to high average. His interests are anything that crawls, flies, or swims! I must point out, however, that his interests are not diversified. His only real love is wildlife. Has an astonishing amount of information in this area.”

  By the end of the third grade, a psychologist would have seen clearly a pattern developing within the child. The teacher commented, “Richie is above average in science and social studies. But he is also very talkative, tends to be disruptive, sneaky, and sometimes defiant of authority. Shrinks responsibility as much as possible. Lacks self-discipline. Only works on what interests him. Effort poor except when something interests him. Has many interesting things to contribute to class activities, but lack of control makes him a problem.”

  In retrospect, perhaps George and Carol should have sought professional counseling for their son. But a decade ago parents did not rush to the child psychologist when a school report indicated the boy was a troublemaker who lacked self-discipline. They would have been rare parents had they done more than worry a little and nurse the hope that the trouble was all part of growing pains. What concerned the Dieners more, but only slightly at that, was the fact that Richie scored in the top 20 percent of a nationwide testing of elementary grade children, but his regular school marks, save his predictable “excellents” in science and nature, were average or below average. “Oh, well,” said George, “it’s not news to anybody that I was never much of a scholar. I still have to pronounce words silently when I read a newspaper.” Carol nodded. “I learned early in school that I could make passing 65’s without much effort,” she admitted. “And I usually settled for that.”